New Clause 3
Housing and Regeneration Bill
1:45 pm
Alistair Burt (Shadow Minister, Communities and Local Government; North East Bedfordshire, Conservative)
I beg to move, That the clause be read a Second time.
It is not uncommon for attempts to be made to ask a new agency or Government organisation of some significance to lay an annual report to Parliament, to give Members the opportunity to raise matters concerning it and find time for a debate. I am keen on the new clause, even more so following the events of last week.
The purpose behind the new clause is obvious. A number of the debates that we have had have centred around the concern that the agency’s powers will be extensive. As we have said more than once, the sum of the parts will be rather greater than the extent of the individual parts. An agency that combines the power to acquire, deliver and build will be extensive. We have discussed conflicts of interest; guidance on the extensive powers to be given; local authorities’ concerns about the circumstances in which powers might be used to take over their planning functions; compulsory purchase; whether the agency will be driven by the numbers game, and whether it will concentrate fully on wider regeneration issues. All those matters have been raised both in the Committee and by a number of the outside bodies that have been interested in the creation of the new agency and beyond.
On those grounds alone, there is more than good reason for the HCA to produce a report such as we describe in the new clause. I am tempted to think that the Minister will be sympathetic to it, because it is not in his nature to restrict information. From how the matter has been handled on all sides, he will have seen a genuine interest in the agency’s work from Members who, in many instances, have seen things in their own constituencies that will relate to its activities. Many hon. Members have a real interest in both housing and regeneration, and would want the time and attention of the House directed towards those matters. I would have thought that the Minister was sympathetic to and interested in allowing such scrutiny, and that it might just have been missed out. It seems to me that creating such a large body and not providing for an annual report to Parliament is an oversight.
I shall now relate the clause to the written statement last week, in which for the first time we had a chance to see how extensive the agency’s powers would be and what new things it would take from the Department, which the Minister for Housing was able only to hint at when she gave us evidence. She fleshed them out in that statement. We now have an even stronger right to demand that the Bill include a clause requiring the production of a report on the agency’s activities. I do not want my arguments to be too wide, but I can fairly draw attention to two matters in the written statement for which responsibility is to be transferred from the Department to the new agency: housing market renewal and the Thames Gateway.
Currently, if things go wrong with housing market renewal—it has been known—we can question the Minister and the matter is dealt with in Parliament. The transfer to the agency of powers on pathfinder schemes and housing market renewal does not negate the Department’s ultimate responsibility, but the matter will be handled by the agency with its extensive powers. We need a mechanism by which the agency can inform Parliament how such a major project is going. I will not linger on pathfinder, but the recent NAO report on the pathfinder programme said in one of its conclusions:
“There is no guarantee that intervening in the housing market in this way will address the causes rather than the symptoms of the problems experienced in these neighbourhoods.”
It was not a very good report and we are talking about £2.2 billion being spent over five years.
As I am leaving this post—